Propheteering?

More Armstrong trouble

By any standard, some of the expenses run up by top brass at the 75,000-member Worldwide Church of God were boggling: $22,571 for a stay at the Hotel Plaza Athenee in Paris; $12,402 for six pieces of Steuben glass; $7,509 for furnishings at Church Treasurer and General Counsel Stanley R. Rader's pad in Tucson. In just one year, the lagniappe of church VIPs totaled more than $1 million.

Worldwide Church expense accounts have been just one element of the latest chapter in the continuing struggle over control of the 45-year-old institution. Acting on behalf of dissident members and California's attorney general, the state's superior court appointed a receiver to take temporary control of the church's multimillion-dollar assets. The dissidents accuse Rader, 48, and the church's head and self-styled prophet, Herbert W. Armstrong, 86, of not only lavish spending but "liquidating the properties of the church on a massive scale." The plaintiffs charge that in the past six months alone 50 pieces of church property, worth millions, have been sold. The attorney general's move touched off pandemonium; at one point, staffers at Pasadena headquarters tried to lock out state agents arriving to seize control, then were caught trying to spirit out church records.

Last June, Herbert Armstrong excommunicated his mellifluous TV preacher son Garner Ted, 48, who now operates a 3,000-member offshoot, the Church of God, International, from Tyler, Texas. Since the family fallout, the Worldwide Church has been run by Rader, a lawyer who was baptized by Herbert in 1975. The suit claims that Rader, whose 40-year-old secretary wed Herbert Armstrong in April 1977, may have reaped the profit from the $1.8 million sale of his Beverly Hills estate, which allegedly was maintained at church expense. The suit also raises questions about Rader's financial involvement in an ad agency, a travel agency and a book-publishing firm that sell services to the church. At a receivership hearing in Los Angeles last week, Rader won the right to look at his records --but only with the permission of a court-appointed official. Says Deputy State Attorney General Lawrence Tapper: "We've termed it letting the wolf inside the chicken coop." But the court rejected Rader's claim it is unconstitutional for the state to interfere in church business.

Rader maintains that he has "a contract [with the church] that protects me no matter who is in power." But who now will protect the church? The founding prophet is aged and frail. Enrollment at its Ambassador College, once 1,120, is collapsing. And a church lawyer claims that tithing has dropped off so sharply among the church's puzzled members that its debts are mounting at a rate of $1 million a week.

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